The nature and extent of mutational pleiotropy in gene expression of male Drosophila serrata.

ABSTRACT: The nature and extent of mutational pleiotropy remain largely unknown, despite the central role that pleiotropy plays in many areas of biology, including human disease, agricultural production, and evolution. Here, we investigate the variation in 11,604 gene expression traits among 41 mutation accumulation (MA) lines of Drosophila serrata. We first confirmed that these expression phenotypes were heritable, detecting genetic variation in 96% of them in an outbred, natural population of D. serrata. Among the MA lines, 3385 (29%) of expression traits were variable, with a mean mutational heritability of 0.0005. In most traits, variation was generated by mutations of relatively small phenotypic effect; putative mutations with effects of greater than one phenotypic standard deviation were obser

SUBMITTER: McGuigan K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3948815 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature